Sometimes I feel like Rapunzel — making decisions up at the top, all alone. I’ve finally made it: I’ve become the master of my own time, my own space. I have a room of my own, and I’m the first in my bloodline to be paid to sit in it. It’s a sincere honor to have become what I am.
This is what you think as a #professionalartist: As long as I’m creating, I’m surviving.
To go full-time with your promising art/design career is to live a dream. When everyone’s moving fast, you get to be slow. You have time to look around, to observe, dissect, draw out.
My favorite part about being an artist is that I get to feel. I can follow an emotion until it’s run its course, which seems healthier than letting it fester.
And whatever I find/feel from the experience becomes an idea for the future, which lights a fire within me that I can barely control, which activates my hands, which — random, but — turn the skin of a once-living animal into a beautiful, and never-before-seen functional object, that finds its home with someone else, and serves them in a positive way.
It’s wild because someone could buy a one-off leather bag from me, carry it everyday, and have no idea that I created it directly after I cried while writing on a piece of cardboard and timelapsing myself.
Creative energy works in the most mysterious ways.
Sometimes I think: jeez, I should probably be making more money at this.
But because I make just enough to skate by and inch forward, while hanging onto what I have — and after all, I’m Rapunzel, so zero dependents — it’s easy to dismiss the more strategic, logical side of my career as ‘not my department right now.’
Instead, I attach my questions and concerns to a carrier pigeon and command her to a distant land, where an empty office chair sits under a tree, a position yet to be filled: The Person Who Bridges the Gap Between Material and Technological Worlds.
Until I become her myself, or the right candidate steps out of the fog, my forward momentum strategy remains: ‘heal my relationship to money/tech/success through deep shadow and inner child work’ — which isn’t necessarily a get-rich-quick method, but just like everything else: it’ll work eventually.
Until then, I submit to biding my time in my tower, making slow moves, perfecting my needlework, talking to birds. My mind gets to wander into my future life (swimming in a pool, on a hill by the ocean, surrounded by people I love) while my hands remain in the present, forming early stage arthritis.
And so it goes. Everything will work itself out eventually.
I think that sentiment is the root of why all artists create art: as long as I’m creating, as long as I’m doing the thing I’m compelled to do, everything will eventually work out.
We’re willing to bet our entire lives on it.
It’s kind of tragic, the different paths we choose, because I could be saying that same thing to myself, but living an artless life I hate, instead of an abundant one I love.
Artists do the things they’re compelled to do, rather than the things they feel they ‘should’ do — and we both suffer and thrive from the consequences.
Another thing about being an artist that I’ll say again: you get to move slow when everyone else has to move fast.
For every minute of overwhelming emotional exertion over creating, you get an equal minute of just chillinnnnn. Lounging. Getting really into your music. Going on research journeys into other art. Breaking your own heart and then fixing it again. Taking care of your body. Time slows down for you to do these things because they’re just as much a part of the job as executing the work. The trick is to flow between both stages, to know when to rest and when to act. The best ideas always come to me when I’m in rest of some kind.
When you’re an artist, you’re both a channel and a vessel, which means you need to be able to hold information, as well as let it pass through you. So everything you experience and learn makes you stronger, and the better you take care of yourself, the better your art becomes. That’s the cheat code.
It feels like a gift to have cracked it, but I’d be lying if I said it never gets lonely, or fucking terrifying, or extremely embarrassing. Part of committing to an artist’s life, I’ve found, is learning how to fold the insecurities into all the other muses.
And: enjoy company when support passes through. Studio assistants and helpers of all kinds float through my open windows like slow-moving clouds, offering temporary shade. Each time they visit, they bring something exciting and new. At the beginning, it was hard for me to invite others in — because to let someone into your vision means you have to believe in it so much yourself that you’re willing to lead another. Hiring help as an independent artist/designer is one of the quickest ways I’ve found to test my own commitment. It always requires a level-up of some kind, to let someone else in. It took a lot of trial and error, but I’ve learned to appreciate all of my visitors, learn from them, and hope for more.
And when there are no visitors, but I don’t feel lonely, terrified, or embarrassed, I know I’m in Solitude — a wide open field to think about what I’m thinking about, extract the most invigorating ideas, and scheme on how they can be brought to life. There’s a lot of scheming in an artist’s life. And schemes are fun to pull off, especially if there’s a team involved.
I don’t know how to end this, so I’ll conclude with a thought I’ve been stepping into lately as I rebuild my career into whatever comes next:
It’s better to be a mountain, upon which others can live and thrive, than to be a volcano of ideas, mesmerizing to watch, but absent of fertile ground.
Right now, I feel like I’m in the in-between — the liminal world between volcano and mountain. The cleanse and cool-off, before the abundance of regrowth. It’s an inspiring place to be, both lonely and exciting.
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